Children
by Swiper. No swiping
Summary: He finds that it hurts a little bit, but then stops.
He is shaken awake. Torso moving forwards, backwards, forwards. Head sent rocking. No visuals. Squeaking. No visuals, remember. Are his eyes closed? No. His eyes are open but he cannot see. He feels material on his face. Rough. Woven fibers. Burlap perhaps. He feels the ground with his bare feet and realizes that he's shivering. Every time he exhales he feels the cloth in front of him, on his face rather, become a little damp, a little more soaked with perspiration. He is seated on something cold. That's what's causing him to shiver. He kicks his legs. His feet are bare. They were not bare once, but they are now. He exhales and feels his own breath on his face. There is a sudden shift in gravity and he is sent once again into a rocking motion. Another chorus of squeaks. Hydraulics straining, it sounds like. He leans forward with the shaking of the world only to find that his hands pull him back. He tries to move his hands but he finds that they are bound together. They were not always bound together, but they are now. There is another rumbling, more sinister. His ears perk up to hear it, and he feels the same rough cloth on them as well. Burlap, definitely. On his head. Obscuring his vision. The ominous sound is a motor, faint and bordering on infrasound, coming from his left. That would be where the motor is located, his ears tell him. He rubs his feet on the floor. The floor outside the darkness is cold, just like the rest of his body. There is a ridge in the floor, he can feel it. He runs the length of it in front of him with the space between his toes, feeling the difference between the temperature of the floor and his own. Cold metal. The same that he's sitting on. Everything here in the waking world is metallic. Inorganic. Constructed.

This conclusion is problematic because this is different than how he remembers it being before. There is a troubling logic gap between how it was before he was awake and how empirical evidence shows it is now. Because he can't see, he assumes that he is in a vehicle. This would explain the hydraulics squeaking, the motor humming, and the metallic floor. There was a time before when he was not in a vehicle. He does not remember the time in between that time and the present.

Then he hears another sound. A short moan, low at first and increasing in pitch. Another mobian, female, older than him. She moans again, somewhere close to him but not next to him. In front of him somewhere, in the darkness. Full of emotion. Confusion. Pain. The vehicle moves, shakes again, and everything is sent rocking, including him against his will. The woman keeps moaning, stopping only to choke on her own saliva. He deduces from the choking that she is crying. There was not always this material on his face. It was put there, presumably during the period of time between now and what he last remembers. He deduces that this material must also be on that woman's face. She must not be able to see anything either. Her hands must also be bound, her feet bare. There is another sound in the darkness. It sounds like quiet words, kept at a whisper tone. Non-gendered. A prayer. He deduces that there are other people in the vehicle with him. All of their heads are covered with burlap. All of them are being kept in the dark on purpose. As though they're not meant to know that they're in a vehicle. As though they're not meant to know that there are others like them here. As though they're not meant to know where they're going.

He does not know where he is. He has some idea of what is happening but it is only a theory, not really founded by anything concrete. To be more specific, he knows where he is but not why he is there. He is in a vehicle, something mechanical, presumably traveling somewhere. He does not know where they are headed. He does not know why he is there. He does not know why any of them are there.

Thoughts interrupted by a sudden noise. Metal scraping on metal, sliding friction. To his left. In the darkness. The whispers stop. The moans continue. Then, on top of the moans, noise. Garbled, distorted, and harsh. Like a radio signal cutting in and out of static. His head hurts. His chest hurts. His heart is beating fast, he can feel the blood vessels in his face constricting involuntarily. Barometric pressure increases, the oncoming storm of adrenaline in the nervous system. This is panic. This is fear. He knows what that noise is. He wishes he didn't.

Noise moving, punctuated by a clank. Metal hitting metal. And again. A footstep. Something that's supposed to sound like a footstep. Noise getting closer. His heart rate increases at a rate directly proportional to the distance between him and the noise. His body is involuntarily attempting to take in more oxygen, but he's trying to stifle his breath, to play dead. In the hopes that it won't notice him. The metal footsteps get closer, pass by him in the darkness. Then stop. More noise, more static. Some whirring. The moaning woman, she is still moaning. He exhales, letting a little bit of built up air out at a time to minimize noise, a slow and quiet deflation. She is making more noise than him: therefore, it will take her instead of him. He deduces that the machine has found her. The moans get a little more desperate, a little louder. She has probably processed what is about to happen to her. He is able to make out what she's saying, although it's a bit muffled. He listens. She is choking back sobs. She is saying "please" over and over again. Then there's a quick snap, a click and a hiss. Release. No sounds anymore. The metal footsteps continue again, going back towards his left, and getting farther away before being cut off by another interlude of metal scraping on metal. Then quiet.

He realizes that was a purely emotional response. Illogical. He was afraid of being taken, taken by them. But here he is, in a strange vehicle with his hands bound and his head in a hood, on purpose. He has already been taken by them. That is why he is here. That is why they are all here. This vehicle is a cage, traveling towards a slaughterhouse.

A voice whispers to the air inside the car. "Hello?"

Surprise.

He doesn't respond. Could it be them? They don't typically make that sound. Could they be mimicking a mobian with pre-recorded dialogue, perhaps? Some kind of trap? What would they expect to gain from entrapping him? He is already a prisoner. He is already in the car. What more could they possibly need from him?

"H-hello," the voice repeats, a little louder than a whisper this time. Deeper tones than the voice before. A man.

He squirms. Still says nothing.

"It's okay, th-they're gone," the man stops, moans a little. "Fu-fucking drugs are m–. Making it hard to speak. You can talk. Quie-quietly."

Breath on his face making the burlap unpleasantly wet now. He supposes there isn't much point in keeping his eyes open anyway if he can't see. So he keeps them closed. Stretches his legs a little, in the space of the car.

"I can hear you m-moving around. Are you awake."

He moves his head up and down, within whatever's obscuring his face. "Yes," he whispers, to whomever can hear him.

"Thank god," the man says. "I was starting to think I was going cra—. Crazy."

The vehicle hits a bump in the road, pitching him forward into the darkness and back onto his seat.

"Can y-you see anything?"

"No," he responds.

"Neither can I. They've put h-hoods on us."

"Where," he starts, cut off by another jilt from the moving vehicle. "Where are we?"

"I don't know exactly," the man says. "I was, I was—on the farm. I was a-at the farm, and there was a, humming. I just—"

The car rocks again, cutting off the man with a rhythmic torrent of squeaks.

"Th-these drugs are making it r-really hard to think," the man's voice has dropped back into a whisper. "I just remember my wife. Sh-she was screaming. Oh shit, my kids."

The man's voice suddenly raises to a shout. "A-Adam? Fi-Fiona? Shit. Valerie? Are you here?" No one responds.

"What are you doing," he asks.

"Adam?"

"You're going to," swallows a hard lump of mucus, his mouth uncomfortably dry. "You're going to get us in trouble."

"Son?" the man whispers. "Is that you?"

"Me?"

"Y-you sound like him. Do, do you remember anything?"

Neurons trying to fire in the brain, but feeling scattered. Lost, somewhere. A numbness falls over his body. He remembers, but nothing that makes him understand what he remembers. Speckled light. Blurred figures. Visions.

"I—" he starts.

"You're h-him," the man sounds certain. "You have to be. You h-have to be my son. Th-there aren't any other kids cl-close by us, only adults. It w-wouldn't make sense. Oh god. What did they do to you."

"I don't know." It's true. He doesn't.

"We're gonna g-get out of this, Adam," the man says. "I'll f-figure out a way to stop this."

The sound of metal scraping on metal fills the car again. Motor rises to a crescendo, then falls, quieting itself. A song sung of garbled data streams, then movement. Pounding of slow footsteps across the floor of the car. They hush, silently agreeing to the same plan to keep quiet, but they already knew, they had heard. Suddenly he feels himself being lifted off his chair, into the darkness in front of him. His legs dangle underneath him. He yelps, in spite of trying to keep the pretense of being sedated.

"You," a synthetic voice commands. "Now."

"Wh-what the hell!" the man shouts. "You put him down!"

"Both," the synthetic voice booms. "Awake."

A quake, a shift in gravity, and he feels his legs swinging beneath him, his torso kept rigid in the unseen grasp. When the movement stops, he realized that all movement has stopped. The ubiquitous hum of the vehicle's motor has ceased. Everything has stopped. For a moment, all is quiet, and then more footsteps approach him.

"Urination," the same voice commands. "Defecation. Outside."

Suspended in the darkness, he hears clicking coming from behind him. His wrists drop, still bound by something he can't see. Unshackling him, perhaps. He drops, his feet feel the cold metal platform beneath him. Out of the frying pan and into the fire. In front of him he hears another set of clicks. The man, he assumes, being unshackled as well.

He is pushed, lurching forward blindly. A short outburst from the man behind him, air expelling from his lungs. He is moved in a direction down a corridor, feet feeling the ridges in the floor with each step forward, then, a drop. Another yelp tears itself from his chest, this time more in pain than surprise. His knees sting, a scrape. A different kind of ground beneath him, still cold. But soft.

Without warning, the covering is removed from his head.

Hard light burns into his eyes, then begins to show shapes. A cold blue sky stretches out within his field of vision. Green grass. No, trees. A sea of trees, extending out underneath the sky, covering hills in the distance. He listens to the wind moving, the rustling of the waves of grass. It is unfamiliar. It is all unfamiliar.

He swallows. He turns his head to look. Above him looms a menacing metal golem, in a shape that parodies his own. Reflexively his chest lurches upwards a bit. He was prepared to see it, knowing well where he was, but he's never been this close to one before. The red visor on the robot's face glistens, moving back and forth, scanning, and for a moment he can feel the usual radio hiss reverberating through his skull.

He shivers. Emotional response. Purely emotional response. Remove the situation from the context.

Then he turns, he sees the man for the first time. A fox, much like himself. Yellow fur, much like his own. A patch of fur is missing from his cheek, a perfect square covered in wrinkled scar tissue, like someone pressed a hot iron to his face. Two robots stand behind him. The man is not that much older than him. Maybe eighteen. He is very young, not really all that much of an adult. The man looks him up and down. Ears slowly drooping backwards. Eyes widened by some nerves firing in conjunction with information processed.

"Y-you're," the man says. "You're n-not him. Not m-my son."

Then something begins to happen in the man's face. A series of twitches, a ripple in an otherwise stoic expression. Glands of the eyes secreting. Registering. "My k-kids. Oh god." The man turns, planting part of his snout into his arm for a moment, then unfurls, his eyes a little glassier than before.

The robots shove the two of them, herding them. He looks at the man, then looks down the side of the road, perched on a massive hill that rolls down into a forest. A wide, grassy clearing stands between the pair, the robots, the road, and the woods.

"Urinate," the robot intones, before switching to another quiet but harsh current of static.

The older fox, the man, he squirms uncomfortably. Shifting in his clothing, his hands still tied behind him.

"I g-gotta problem," the man says. "I can't go yet."

Shadows shifting behind him. The robot moves away from his back, gliding behind the older fox and staying there.

"Problem," the robot states.

"Could y-you undo my pants for me," he says. "Pull 'em down a bit. I can't do i-it myself, what with my hands tied like this, and I ain't looking to get soaked with my own piss."

The robot complies with his request, unbuckling the man's pants and pulling out his penis. Contact makes the man wince slightly, snout twitching. The robot stays close behind the pair, standing right next to the overpass on the side of the road.

"Urinate," the robot commands. "Now."

"I-I'm a little pee shy. Gimme a minute," the man mutters. "It'll happen."

He tries to read the man's face, but he's just staring out into the woods in the distance, or the hills even farther away. He looks back and forth between the scenic view and the man's face, trying to read his thoughts.

Then the man looks at him.

Something in his chest drops. A balloon letting out air.

The man nods twice to him, then looks back out at the woods.

"Urinate now," the robot commands again, grabbing the man's arm.

In response he rams his shoulder into the robot's head, knocking it back slightly.

"Fuck!" the man screams, grimacing in pain for a moment, but then turns the other shoulder and slams into the robot again.

The man turns to him, suddenly.

He starts to shout: "Run, k—"

But his words are cut off by the sharp sound of gas depressurizing. His mouth hangs open.

Eyes instantly lose focus.

The man's body pitches forward, crumpling on the ground.

The back of his head is an open flower.

Three bots stand with their rifles raised.

Three move towards him and he turns and runs.

Run run run run run run RUN.

SHIT.

Behind him the whizzing of scattershot, flight trajectories, the kiss of heat and oil in the air. He flies down the hill towards the forest. He has never run this fast before. Colors blur as the world speeds up around him. He moves so fast he feels numb. Bullets fly around him, barely missing. His nerves fire sympathetically, imagining the searing pain of a bullet breaking into his back muscles. He has never run this fast before; his eyes are watering and he is letting them water. He can only feel the ground beneath him every other step. He reaches the tree line and runs right through it. All he can do is focus on what's ahead of him. Trees. Space between them. Everything else in the world is greyed out by tunnel vision.

Eventually the trees become too dense to move through at high speeds, and he begins to slow down.

He begins to feel the burning in his muscles, the effects of adrenaline leaving him. Now and then he turns his head, hoping to catch a glimpse of a flashlight, a robotic body, anything that should tell him to keep running. He doesn't. He keeps running anyway.

It's worse, almost, that he doesn't see them, he thinks.

He keeps running.

It's worse because that way he doesn't know where they are.

He stops.

His heart pounds in his chest.

It's cold in the woods and he can hear nothing except the sound of his own heart.

They could have spread out.

He tries running again.

A branch catches his foot, he stumbles. Falls with one shoulder towards a tree. Clenching his hands into fists reflexively.

They could have spread out among the forest, raking through it to find him.

He tries running again but his lungs feel like they're on fire now.

He walks.

They might catch him.

He stops.

They won't catch him.

But they might.

He walks, slower.

Feeling the wet earth spread beneath his toes.

He breathes in through his nostrils for the first time in a while, feeling the tension in his temples and the pumping of his heart in excruciating detail.

Chest moving up and down.

His hot breath condensing into clouds in the cool air.

In the distance, a locust begins calling. Gives three or four cries, then stops. No garbled radio static, no songs of data streams.

Where is he?

The woods.

Is this familiar?

No.

How does he know if he's safe?

He's not.

He pushes himself forward.

Where is he going?

He doesn't know.

Is there anywhere he can go except forward?

No.

He pushes himself again to keep walking, only letting momentum guide his movements.

The light gets thicker again as the trees begin to thin out a little. Small shrubby plants get more numerous amongst the trees. He picks up the pace, realizing that if the trees clear into a meadow, he'll be more visible. He doesn't know how far behind they are. He doesn't know how far he's run. They might not be far behind at all.

Brush thickens. The ground underneath him turns from dry dirt into wetter clay. Dead leaves stick haphazardly out of the mud. He stumbles, losing his balance. He tries taking a step forward and his other foot flies out from underneath him, and then he falls, lands with his chin and shoulders in the muck. The nerves in his arms and face fire. His knees feel scraped. The wind is knocked right out of his abdomen, breathing is sharp. He curses.

Then the bushes around him in the clearing rustle. One to his left, first, and then a couple others around him. Surrounding him. There are more noises. He is surrounded. Rustles, followed by loud mechanical clicks, like the sounds of doors shutting. All around him.

He doesn't pull himself out of the mud, not completely. He does stay on his knees. Swallows hard, a lump of coagulated mucus, dust, and fear running down his throat.

He cannot run anymore.

The bush to his left parts. Inside there is another mobian, like him. Pink.

His eyes widen and his shoulders slump a little, but he does not feel any less afraid.

She is not much older than him. Nine years old, maybe. Her face is locked in an expression of concentration, black mud smeared in deliberate strokes underneath her eyes. A speckled green bandana wrapped around her dirt-crusted forehead. She is pointing something at him, a long hollow stick made of metal. A rifle. Like the ones that the robots have.

From the surrounding brush, mobians emerge. Yellows, oranges, tans, blues, reds. All around his age, some older, some younger, some much younger. Eleven years old, eight years old, five years old. All with guns, trained on him. All with their fingers on triggers, itching, muttering, and shivering.

The pink one, she looks at him. Grunts.

"What clan are you," she says.

He opens his mouth but finds he cannot speak. Instead his jaw moves weakly, up and down.

She rolls her eyes, exhales sharply through her nose. "Whom do you serve? Are you robotic or mobian? Speak, fox!"

He finally speaks. "Mobian."

"What clan. Are you. Where did you come from?"

"From," he stops. Swallows again. "I don't know."

The pink mobian lowers her gun. "What do you mean you don't know?"

"He's clanless, chief," one of the others says to her. He's of a smaller build, green and feathered, possibly younger than her, but old enough to sport a disfiguring scar runs down through one unfocused, dead eye and part of his beak.

"No clan," he says. "He must come from the wastes."

"If he came from the wastes, then he'd smell like shit," the girl notes, lightly poking her captive in the side with the barrel of her gun. "I only smell dirt and blood on this one."

Then she spits on the ground. "How did you get here?"

"How did I—" the fox mutters. "Tr- truck."

"A truck?"

"Y– a truck."

"A truck. Shit."

"How far are we from the road?" the green bird asks the girl.

"I don't know," she stares off into the distance. "Ray?"

"We're still in pretty thick pine woods," says a yellow squirrel who is still pointing his gun at the fox. "I'd say maybe six miles tops. Probably more like five and a half."

"Shit. Okay. Everybody, stay as quiet as possible. I don't want to alert any bots who might be looking for this kid."

She picks him up off the ground by the forearm.

"Can't move your arms? What's your name?"

He says nothing.

"What's y–," she stops.

"Look at that," she says. "Two tails."

He still says nothing, but he can feel his tails twitch, reflexively. As though they independently knew they were being discussed.

"What does that mean?" she asks the bird.

"Means he could be from the wastes after all," Bean suddenly grabs one of the kid's tails, making him yelp in surprise.

"Quiet! Quiet. I'm just examining you," the bird grumbles. "Well, obviously he can feel both of them. Could be a mutant."

"I don't like this," the girl says. "What's your name?"

"I d—" the fox says. "I…"

"You don't have a name, do you."

He doesn't say anything. Just looks at his feet. Embarrassed emotional response? To his physical abnormalities, or his social ones?

Does he have a name? Didn't he have one? He thinks he can hear someone calling out for him, somewhere in the back of his brain. Fuzzy shapes and a distorted voice.

"M—?" he starts.

"Clanless. Nameless," the girl interrupts him, still gripping his arm with a free hand. "Two tails. You've escaped being captured by Robotnik's forces. Not many of us get to say that. Not many of us who get captured get to say anything at all. How exactly did you escape the truck?"

"Um, I ran."

"You ran."

"Away. From the truck."

She blinks, slowly and just as incredulously. "You expect me to believe that?"

The fox's mouth falls open a little. "I'm telling you the truth," he protests.

"That you ran out of a moving vehicle, in which you were probably secured by restraints that you somehow got out of, all the while evading three or four precision killing machines that are programmed to end your life without hesitation. You did all this with your arms bound and bare feet."

"There was," he says. "Someone else."

The man.

The man is dead. They killed the man, right in front of him.

They could have killed him too.

But he ran.

"Chief, what should we do with him?" Bean asks her.

Chief looks the fox in the eyes. "I don't know. I don't like this. Something's not right."

"You think he really escaped?"

"That, or they let him escape," she says, not taking her gaze away from his. "For some reason."

"They, they didn't," the fox blinks back tears. "I swear. I'm telling the truth."

The girl doesn't reply.

"His hands are tied up," Bean says. "His story checks out."

Then: "If there's a chance that your story is true, then you'd better come with us. There could be Swatbots in the woods nearby, searching for you. To capture you. Or us, if they find us."

Then her face gets a little closer to his.

"But listen to me, so help me god," she hisses through grit teeth. "If I find out that you are hiding something from us, I will kill you. Do you understand."

A shiver runs up the fox's spine, then he nods.

"All right," she lets go of him and calls to her troops. "Ray, you've got the cutters. Can you break through the ties on his hands?"

"Do you really think that's a good idea?" the squirrel asks.

"He's unarmed. We've got the guns. If he tries any shit, we'll take him out," the girl says. "Besides, if we keep him tied up he'll only slow us down. Once we get back, we can decide what to do with him."

"Fine," Ray relents, moving towards the fox's back. He grabs the restraints. "Don't move."

A clip and his wrists are released. The fox stretches his arms, rotates his joints.

"Thank you," he says to Ray.

Ray doesn't look him in the eye. "Don't talk to me." A pointed dagger. The fox looks away.

"We're falling back," the girl calls out to the whole group. "Terminating the patrol. How long until we reach Knothole?"

"If we move out now, we should make it back before nightfall," answers a tan sheep as she checks the position of the sun. "Maybe three hours, depending on our pace."

"Remember to keep quiet, everyone," says the chief. "Swatbots might be close by. Stay low and slow to the ground until we make it out two miles at least. If you see any suspicious movement, signal and hold your position. Don't play hero."

"Where are we going?" the fox asks, monitoring the other mobians as they disappear into the foliage.

"Home," the girl gets on her forearms and knees, crawling in the mud. She doesn't look back at him. "Somewhere safe."

A rustle of a bush and she's gone.

He scans, briefly, turning back to look at the pines. Listens to the quiet calling of some insects, somewhere, in there. Then crouches and follows her into the brush.


End file.
